Counterinsurgency, disaster risk reduction, and territorialisation in the Philippines
This article appears in a special issue of Asia Pacific Viewpoint on the theme More-than-complex: Governance and place in Philippine disaster management.
It is the final form of work I had previously presented at the Governing Complex Disasters in Southeast Asia workshop in 2023.
Read the full article here.
Abstract
This article attempts to make historical and institutional sense of the Philippine state’s violent responses to unfolding ecological crises. It reframes the relationship between a ‘weak’ state and a ‘high-risk’ territory as part of an ongoing process of territorialisation, that is, ways of knowing and controlling territories and populations. By tracing organisational forms and lineages, personnel and practices, it finds that the Philippine state had come to rely on its security forces to organising and staff its new disaster risk management bureaucracies. This is partly an outcome of the military developing the central state’s most credible capability in disaster response, through civil-military operations; a reoccurrence of patterns that span previous rounds of state formation, as impelled by managing risks over a tenuously consolidated territory; and an entrenchment of a pathway of elite formation of rewarding retired officers with experience in combat command with posts in the civilian bureaucracy, itself a way of managing the risk of unrest among security forces. Routines, subjectivities and ideologies of counterinsurgency came to be transposed to reducing and managing disaster risk, alongside the deprecation of other possible forms of expertise.
Kenneth Cardenas 